My work was published in Early Childhood Education, a peer-reviewed journal. With these questions in mind, I placed four racially diverse dolls (white, Latina, Black with lighter skin, and Black with medium skin) in a diverse preschool classroom and observed Black preschool girls as they played for one semester. What if, for instance, the children were not forced to choose between one doll or the other, but could choose dolls on their own without any adults prodding them? And what if there were more races and ethnicities available from which to choose? Although I respect the Clarks for what they contributed to society’s understanding of how Black children see race, I believe their doll tests were really kind of unnatural – and, I would even argue, quite stressful. While these studies let us know that – contrary to what some people may think – children do, in fact, see color, the tests were far from perfect. This experiment – and prior research by the Clarks – showed that young children notice race and that they have racial preferences. They would ask questions like, which doll – the Black one or the white one – was the nice doll? This required the children to select a doll to answer the question. In their doll test studies, the Clarks prompted young children to respond to questions of character. So I set out to get my doctorate in early childhood education and began to look deeper into how children develop racial identities. Maybe it was much more nuanced than whether Black kids attended an all-Black school or went to school alongside other kids.īut to verify that Black kids were still viewing their Blackness in a negative light the way the Clarks found that they were back in the 1940s, I would have to do so as a researcher. Maybe, I thought, the racial bias wasn’t related to schools as much as it was to the broader society in which we live. It was affecting Black kids in integrated schools in the 21st century as well. But I knew from experience that the preference for whiteness that the Clarks found was not limited to just Black kids in segregated schools in the 20th century. Their findings about Black children’s negative view of themselves were attributed to the effects of segregation. Board of Education case to advance the cause of integrated schools. The Clarks’ research was used in the 1954 landmark Brown v. I began to suspect that if my daughter had identity issues despite being raised by a culturally aware Black mom like me – an educator at that – then countless other Black children throughout America were probably experiencing some sort of internalized self-hatred as well. Perturbed, I spoke with others about the episode. She told me she also wanted blue eyes “like the other kids” at her school. I told her, “I like it.” She just quipped, “You can have it.” But it wasn’t just her skin color she had a problem with. I tried to assuage her negative feelings about the skin she was in. But when she switched over to a virtually all-white preschool, my daughter started saying she didn’t like her dark skin. When my daughter attended a diverse preschool, there weren’t any issues.
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